


Is this a date? Maybe.

by Ys Aster (asterCrash)



Category: Kill Six Billion Demons (Webcomic)
Genre: F/F, Tea, Unearthly romance, kind of short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 11:32:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9489125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asterCrash/pseuds/Ys%20Aster
Summary: Twice bitten, once shy, the next duel between Juggernaut Star and Mathangi ten Meti ends in a stalemate, and the stalemate ends in tea, and the tea ends in something else entirely.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to be playing fast and loose with Juggernaut Star's pronouns, coming from Maya's perspective.

The advantage of the sword of Maybe was that there was very little to clean, and it very rarely collected any blood, no matter how much blood it drew. Maya’s teacher had often remarked that it was the perfect parody of life, in that it was short and brutal and prone to violence, yet somehow it remained clean. Today though, blood coated her like a fine mist, the stickiness of it already ruining her grip and making her wish to spend another ten years face down in a river. Even the thorn knight before her seemed to despise the carnage it had wrought, holding its dripping claw out before its face, as if inspecting the haemoglobic dripping for some measure of mortal sin to justify this horror. The Vatra, formerly in possession of two arms, still screamed wetly, falling about in a vain effort to balance on a floor increasingly slippery with their own blood. It was some time before they fell silent.

Maya stood in perfect stillness, which was her third least favourite kind of stillness, with her blade held at the ready to her side. The monster ceased its contemplation and regarded her, armour seeming to prickle even more as she watched it, keeping her eye out for any sign of a killing motion.

“Wont underestimate you this time,” the monster growled like crackling fire, every word meted out with all the brutality Maya had come to expect from it in their two meetings.

“Don’t regard me too highly, I am first and foremost a failed noodle vendor.” She scanned the room for any glimpse of the angel’s true body, that horrible shrieking wheel of fiery eyes. Wherever it was, It was choosing to keep itself hidden, knowing what she was capable of, and knowing that she knew now what to cut.

No words came from within the thorned helm, but Maya thought she caught a glimmer of flame from behind the blackened visor. Neither made a move, and the only sounds that filled the room were those quiet moans of the dying and the crackle of fresh and hungry fires working their way up the room’s intricate wooden panelling. Likely not another room like this existed in the entire multiverse and yet soon it would be nothing more than ash. Hopefully someone would build something useful in its place. More likely, they would build a brothel, which was definitely useful but not the kind of useful Maya was hoping for.

“If we’re going to be here all night,” Maya spoke, her blade still balanced perfectly still, “care for a drink?” A careful sway of her hip, nothing to throw off her stance, and her wineskin sloshed.

The angel growled, and it sounded nothing like an animal or human or servant or any of the other races that made sense in the universe. The only sound more terrifying sound Maya had heard in her life was a ebon devil’s fart, and that had resulted in seventeen deaths. Hearing the way its voice reverberated within its helm sent a shiver up her spine she’d long thought she’d lost. She knew fear, simple, mortal, pants-shitting terror. Her master had been very insistent that she not lose contact with that fear, because it was the only way any fool could keep their head on their shoulders long enough to dislodge someone else’s. Maya knew fear. This though, this was different. It tasted like fear, but with just a hint of bitterness to it. Not the bitter of chocolate, with its concealed sweetness, nor the bitter of coffee with its chemical shock, nor even the bitterness of the first cup of poorly made wine. No, the only bitterness this shiver could contain was the bitterness of

“Tea,” growled the angel.

Lust.

“Tea?” Maya asked, sparing the flap of a hummingbird’s wings to glance aside and search the floor for that chest she’d seen burst open. When she glanced back up, the angel had not moved an inch. She made an effort to move her eyes slower with her next sweep of the floor, looking back up at the almost desultory pace of a bullet sinking into a man’s skull. If the angel noticed, it did not comment, but it did not move either.

She raised her eyebrows on spying a relatively undamaged pot, uncertain if the gesture meant anything to the angel, knowing that its true form was more closely related to an ox cart than a human, but also knowing what she had seen in the seconds after it reformed, burning bones melting into supple skin in a moment of distraction. One monster to another, she knew what it was like to hide the things that let other people see the horrors inside you.

The angel followed her gaze, helm rotating with a sound like a rusted gate swinging open. Maya reflected for the first time that she’d be interested in figuring out how to bed the aeon. Ride the wheel as it were. She knew that for all the positioning of its head, there was no way the angel was focusing on anything other than her. It had been a long time since anyone had not looked at her quite so attentively. She missed the power of seeing something this eager to pretend she wasn’t of interest. It was thrilling, and it tasted bitter.

The angel moved slowly, and its guard never dropped. She started to doubt whether she’d be able to land a hit on it without levelling the building, even accounting for the fact the wheel was still unaccounted for. When at last it stood up, with its prize, Maya began to feel foolish for still holding her sword out. For good measure, she remained foolish looking for a few more moments before lowering her arm. Her teacher had always insisted that fear of looking foolish was the fourth most ridiculous fear, right after fear of death but just before fear of clowns.

“Water,” the angel rasped, voice echoing within that empty helm like a dying wolf howling at the bottom of a well. Maya reached behind her back as slowly as she could allow, retrieving a gourd she rarely had occasion to drink from. She tossed it across the floor, still littered with discarded weapons and at least one arm, and the angel caught it with the hand not holding the teapot. It made short work of the gourd, crushing it in the palm of a thorned gauntlet until water streamed from the ruined mess and into the pot.

“Leaves?” Maya asked, hoping that she was not about to drink anything worse than she did every day. The angel responded by plucking a spine from its shoulder, held between thumb and forefinger, and grinding it into flakes above the pot. Maya almost thought to ask where they were going to heat it before she noticed steam rising from the pot and a smell filling the air that she could only describe as lustful. She wondered what an angel considered seductive, and wondered if perhaps this was it.

They stood in silence as the tea brewed, but as silences went it was a large improvement on their silences so far. When the silence was done, the angel poured the tea into two salvaged cups and threw the tea pot over its shoulder to shatter noisily in the now mostly silent room. It stood contemplative, a cup in each hand as it stared at Maya through its helm. This conspicuous attention was thrilling as well, but not quite so much as the angel throwing the cup, still filled with scalding liquid, across the room and at her face. She caught it, of course, with not a drop spilled. The first thing she’d learned to dodge in her life was boiling soup, long before she learned to dodge fists and feet and swords and death. Long before she’d learned the fastest way to block most things is to cut them before they came close enough to harm you. It was refreshing to have something relatively nonlethal thrown at her for a change.

The tea tasted bitter like sex and death and the kind of wine Maya hadn’t allowed herself in fifty years. It tasted like treason and betrayal and sweat and bleeding and lips on mouths and hushed orgasms in empty battlefields. She tasted a span of her life in the cup, a good span, and more than that she tasted the span of every life she hadn’t lived. The tea flowed around her tongue and was like the caress of a lover you keep coming back to, though they can never give what you need and you give and give and give and give. It coursed down her throat like a fiery motorcycle across the realm of creation and settled in her belly like a happy ending that no one deserves. She felt powerful. She felt weak. She felt like violence and hunger and warmth and need and violence again. It was so, so bitter. The one thought that still held, after her glass was empty and her lips were parched from more was that she needed a cigarette.

Across from her, 6 Juggernaut Star Scours the Universe (for that was her name and Maya could no longer forget it) lowered her glass, no indication of whether the journey was a mutual one, whether an angel could be carried to such heights by a human. Whether they would want to. Maya still tasted the leftovers of infinity on her lips and felt a mixture of pity and loathing and bitter fucking lust for what she saw before her, and knew that there was perhaps a thing she still offered in this fight.

The Maybe sword she dismissed back to her robes, plenty of time for death and dying later, plenty of time when she could no longer feel the ache of everything else’s oblivion in her stomach. She stepped across the floor, slaughter and gore now ignored though it still coated them both. Her robes dragged on what either used to be a Vatra or used to be a good place to keep arms depending on your opinion of things. She did not care.

The helm was hot to the touch, like a pot from the fire, but Maya had long since learned to cut away her pain and did not feel like acting the part of the mortal right now. It lifted from Juggernaut Star’s shoulders with an ease she’d only guessed at, a false face concealing a false face, and behind it she bore witness to the flaming spiked skull within. Her lover’s perfect parody of humanity. It was a good likeness. So much to despise and this was what she chose. That for everything else there was to know about humans, the first two facts were that they suffer and that they die. But there was no need for either tonight.

Juggernaut Star recoiled as she leaned in closer, not moving her feet, but the very flame of her seemed to pull back from the unquenchably hot flesh in front of her. So human, so very human. Maya’s breath disturbed the cold flame in front of her, making it waver, making it reshape itself. Spikes and bone became smooth skin wrought in flame. Lips formed only a second before they touched human skin, sizzling with contact, tasting of bitterness untold.

“Humans,” growled Juggernaut Star between kisses, “why are you always so…”

“Hilarious?” Maya offered.

“Fascinating.”


End file.
